Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Conservation, or Curation? The Effects of the New Endangered Species Limitations

By JOHN A. VUCETICH and MICHAEL PAUL NELSON

AUG. 20, 2014

Credit
Victo Ngai

THE
United States Fish and Wildlife Service — the main agency for the
conservation of species — recently announced a new interpretation of the
Endangered Species Act that severely limits its reach and retreats from
the conservation ethic that healthy landscapes depend on native plants
and animals.

The
law says that a species qualifies for protection if it is in danger of
extinction “throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” A
species does not need to be at risk of extinction everywhere it lives if
it is endangered in a significant portion of its range. But what is
“significant”? And how is “range” defined?

Now,
under a policy that took effect July 31, the agency has provided
answers. The law’s protections, for practical purposes, will be applied
only if a species is at risk of extinction in a vital (read,
significant) portion of its range where its loss would put the entire
species at risk of extinction. And the concept of range no longer takes
into account its historical distribution but defines the concept in
terms of where the species is found now.

This
means that as long as a small, geographically isolated population
remains viable, it won’t matter if the animal or plant in question has
disappeared across the vast swath of its former habitat. It won’t
qualify for protection.

This
interpretation threatens to reduce the Endangered Species Act to a
mechanism that merely preserves representatives of a species, like
curating rare pieces in a museum. Also likely to suffer are efforts to
protect or repopulate areas where endangered species once lived.

Imagine
if this new approach had been in place when the bald eagle was being
considered for protection in the 1970s. Arguably, the national bird
might never have been listed as endangered in most of the lower 48
states, even though it had virtually been extirpated by illegal hunting
and the pesticide DDT. Why? Because a healthy population of bald eagles
remained in Alaska and Canada.

Today,
the return of the bald eagle is one of the great successes of the
Endangered Species Act. The bird is flourishing in the very areas where
it had been wiped out and reasserting its position in the ecological
order that was disrupted by its absence. This was accomplished in part
by using the authority in the law to protect nesting sites and summer
and winter roost sites and to reintroduce the bird into its historical
range.

(The
Fish and Wildlife Service says it still would have protected the bald
eagle under this new interpretation. Nevertheless, a case could have
been made to withhold the law’s safeguards once the bird was no longer
at risk of extinction outright.)

More recently, other threatened animals haven’t been so lucky.

In
cases involving the gray wolf, wolverine and swift fox, the agency,
employing the logic of this new policy to guide it, decided or proposed
to remove or withhold protections for those animals after concluding
there was no risk that they would go extinct. Never mind that they had
vanished from much of the territory they once inhabited. (The gray wolf,
which is in the administrative process of losing its protection under
the law, had been lost from 85 percent of its range but securely
inhabits the last 15 percent.) The agency reasoned that there were
enough of these animals left in their much-diminished range to survive.

Several
years ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service and a sister agency, the
National Marine Fisheries Service, began developing a uniform policy for
interpreting that key phrase in the Endangered Species Act — the line
that says that a species must be at risk “throughout all or a
significant portion of its range” to qualify for protection. Uncertainty
over the meaning of that phrase and government decisions based on
varying interpretations had led to controversy and litigation.

The
two agencies call their reading of the law a “reasonable
interpretation,” although they acknowledge that “there is no single best
interpretation.” In fact, their reading is especially narrow and
possibly contrary to Congress’s intent when it passed one of the
nation’s most important conservation laws. A more appropriate
interpretation of range would be those portions of a species’ historical
distribution that are suitable, or that can feasibly be made suitable,
by mitigating or removing the threats that had caused the species’
decline.

If
the purpose of conservation is merely to preserve the fewest possible
members of a species, then this new policy might be adequate. But this
approach amounts to a retreat from two conservation aspirations that had
long animated the law: first, to mitigate harms that humans had
perpetrated against certain species, such as severely reducing their
geographic range; and second, to make it possible for species to return
to landscapes where they had been extirpated. The idea was that healthy
ecosystems depend on the presence of native species.

Since
taking effect in 1973, the law has been instrumental in saving many
species from extinction, including the California condor, American
crocodile, whooping crane and black-footed ferret. Some 1,400 plants,
animals and fish are now on the list.

This
new approach does not mean that endangered species won’t still be
saved. But it falls far short of the conservation aspirations the law
once embodied. This new policy will result in a world for our children
even more diminished than the one we live in.

John A. Vucetich is an
ecologist at Michigan Technological University. Michael Paul Nelson is
an environmental ethicist at Oregon State University.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 21, 2014, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Conservation, or Curation?

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone